Problems with Enlightenment

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Jasmine V. Bailey

One steady fact that emerges in my attempt to inhabit these narratives is the power of abuse to erase those who suffer it.

A Fictional Account

I want to tell the story of my crimes: not just the ones I’ve committed, but those I’ve suffered, those I’ve wanted to commit, those I’ve understood.

A woman stands before a classroom. Her colleagues are married. They say they love sculpture, or the Second World War, but actually none of them loves anything, especially what they teach. They live for changing out their mid-level SUVs every five and a half years. They like to imagine that not becoming I-bankers was both a choice and evidence of their personal virtue. They have children who they are determined should learn Mandarin on an immersion basis.

Her students are not impressed by their teacher, but it isn’t personal; they are impressed by almost nothing. They are here to learn Spanish, the most “useful” language their parents dream they are smart enough to learn. She has tried to move them with poetry, with the discovery of what a syntactically difficult sentence means in a second language, which you have to pull apart like a piece of origami at the center of which is an opal, lit with stone fire. But they do not pay attention. Two students pay attention, and with her help come to understand what the sentence means, and find the opal, but they are not impressed. They have personal devices and very, very expensive headphones. One day, they make her listen to Avicci on someone’s headphones, worth more than her car. They watch as she places them over her ears and listens. She is duly impressed by how the headphones make it seem like she is alone in the universe with the music she is listening to, which she doesn’t care for. She makes sure to say, “This sounds wonderful!” before handing them back, and when she yells this unintentionally because of the sound-cancelling power of the expensive headphones, they erupt into delighted, satisfied laughter. This represents a good day.

She has little time alone between classes and sports and study hall and “family dinners” with randomly-assigned students wearing awkward suits like undertakers-in-training, but she stays up anyway trying to write about how memory wants to kill us. She is more like a cicada than any human being in her life. She drives home to see her parents too often because they are the only interesting people she knows, with their failing nature photography business, the used Lexus they can’t afford to drive, the eighty-dollar pills her mother can’t sleep without that are probably making her compulsively buy jewelry online.

Eventually a student takes an interest in her. He is tall and in the best physical condition he will ever be in, swimming and wrestling against other young gods whenever he isn’t eating and sleeping to grow the body he brings to class to display before her. It is the fact of touch that she craves, to feel fingers rappel down her spine. She has not projected onto him a great mind or soul. What he really is suffices: a simple beauty, a new person with few thoughts clouding his determination for what he wants. First he begins to come for “extra help,” which is not a bad idea in principle, but doesn’t work in practice. Then he starts spending study hall in the art building, where she is proctor and there are a lot of empty rooms, including the instrument practice rooms, which are soundproof. She rapidly loses track of the convictions she’s carrying with her like the formula for compounded interest. He’s fifty pounds heavier than she is, but he doesn’t force her, and this gentleness intoxicates her. It may be true no one could appreciate him quite as she does. It is certainly true that soon enough he may become an average asshole, drinking Natty Light and trying to pass ECON. If he is rejected, he may forget how to look for whatever he sees in her and, instead, like everyone else, just look for women with low BMI.

If they are discovered, she could be fired and tried in a criminal trial. She would enjoy that the school would have to expend resources containing the scandal. She could be given twelve years, but the real cost would be the things people think about her. Straight men would say out loud, “I wish I had had a teacher like that,” while mothers would call her “predator”, “pathetic”. There are people who feel they are touched too often, whom you can teach the meaning of a sentence, show the opal, but never bring to awe.

A Story Tayeb Salih Made Up

At fifty-five the Headmaster is struck with love for a fourteen-year-old girl. He is not content to pine, and asks her father for permission to take her as his second wife. This is in a village in Sudan decades ago, but the father says no, says, the age difference would not give me peace, and thanks the Headmaster for asking in order to ease the embarrassment they feel, to gesture that he is not so horribly foolish, though he is. Everyone sees it: the honored man demeaned. He is equal parts in love and embarrassed, but love is strong, the body is an animal we rarely get a good look at in daylight.

The Kind of Story You Hear Every Day

Make the headmaster a professor, the daughter a college student, the time the present, place the father God-knows-where, and soon you have the plot of the Squid and the Whale. It is cold comfort to dismiss the fact before you as cliché and doesn’t work when you’re consoling your friend, for whom this affair, which ended seven years ago, is never finished. In the end, Jeff Daniels and the real-life Latin professor are either publicly disgraced or whispered about, but the young woman is not intact. For her, his mistake lingers; it goes bad like a piece of fruit left at the bottom of a bag, bruised by books and bottles, the rot sinking deep into the fabric of the bag so that you can never clean it out. But neither can you throw the bag away, because it’s your life.

One That Happened

Anna Stubblefield becomes a tenured professor, and her interests start to wander. She becomes fascinated by a new practice called facilitated communication, which purports to allow people who can’t communicate to do so with the help of a trained assistant. She ignores the abundance of research discrediting it. She learns how to hold the patient’s arm and help him point at images and type. She is struck with wonder and becomes a messenger of this good news. She involves herself in the case of a man with cerebral palsy who communicates, for the first time, with her hand under his elbow. She helps him take literature classes; she feels herself to be his prophet. Before long, they tell her he has fallen in love with her and try to seduce her. They type shocking things to her when they are alone. For what feels like forever, she resists. There is her husband to consider and their eleven-year age difference. And yet, they have crossed a fathomless deep to step onto the shore of a world they alone share, like two Italian B-actors in Swept Away. She has never been as beautiful as she imagines she is to him, lit with gratitude. Partly sex is something she wants to give him; partly it is something she wants to share. His family will learn this because she will tell them as the latest installment of the revelation. They will not see it the way she sees it; nor will the judge, whose decision about what evidence to allow will condemn her to two consecutive 12-year terms in jail and lifetime parole supervision. But first, the family’s anguish will take her by surprise. She will furnish evidence: “Tell them!” she’ll beg of her lover, with whom she’ll write that she resisted for a long time, the oldest excuse in the book. The word they will use to describe her resistance is valiantly. The term the jury will use for what she and her lover shared is two counts of aggravated sexual assault. This will send a tremor through her belief. But it is not unusual for prophets to be misunderstood. They are describing a world no one else can see, and the visible world is vicious in its jealousy to be the only one.

On Earth As It Is in France

Bardot makes the name Brigitte sublime just in time for you to enjoy it. You marry a banker and with him create three children, which, you discover, the body can survive. The first child is your introduction to how massive love, in fact, is. You are calmer the second time, acquainted, and your luck holds a third time, the beauty unfolding in a wave of blood. You work at a posh school, evaluating Latin translations with the patient tyranny of a demigod.

You grow old slower than even other French women, and when Emmanuel Macron appears in a seat before you, a powerful man not yet grown, and even joins suspiciously your drama club, you do not turn away like a sensible woman because you know no one ever won kleos who wouldn’t gamble with the gods. You throw everything on their table, and manage, against all odds, to keep that job at the lycée, to never go eight months without a husband. Like Aphrodite you pine, but no boar comes for this Adonis; some sympathetic god makes him President instead. Only of France, but you know when to take what you can get. And if he was born just months after your second child, the better to show love’s strange habits, how closely love tends to keep to pain.

The first Adonis was made to show all beauty for its dark sources. His mother, Myrrha, became crazed with love for her own father, and went to him under cover of night. Eventually dawn revealed with her rosy knuckles the crime. In his rage, her father chased her for nine months, until she pleaded with the gods, who took her resplendent child from her and turned her into a tree. That is the story of the first myrrh tree.

Cinyrus, angry at his daughter, his rapist. All he had meant to do was sleep with a girl his daughter’s age every night. He was the king of Cyprus; he could afford it.

Once, Someone, a Genius, Wrote Lolita

In the classic Sufi love story, Majnun, lovesick for Layla, wandered in tattered clothes ribboning in the wind, a beggar who forgot to beg. He wrote love poems, tore them up, and scattered them in rivers hoping they might carry one piece to her. She loved him too, from her tower of privilege, which meant marriage to whoever bought her. Some versions note that her husband was handsome.

In a version I read, Majnun saw Layla again after years of singing and wandering in single-minded devotion. She knew him at once and called out to him, but he didn’t recognize her, even after she pleaded with him. It’s a mystical story; its moral is that the things of this world are both illusions and means by which we may, with enough mortification, achieve union with the real Beloved. Leila’s face was a paving stone Majnun stood on to reach the lips of God.

I am a failed mystic because I think only of Layla’s eyes, no longer worth settling a fortune on, when Majnun looks right through them, how long life must have been after that. It is meant as a tale of enlightenment. But I turn back to earth, to the person in every story who doesn’t find a way out.

Freya Stark begins her memoir of her journeys in the remote Hadrhamaut with the harvesting of incense. Traditionally, only a few families were allowed access to the area where the trees grew, and were themselves considered sacred, inheriting the right to gather the gum. During the harvest they abstained from the pollution of women and the dead, which enhanced the value of what they gathered. Harvesters of incense travel to the scarred trees in the right season and wound them for their astonishing blood. A balm that can smear the rottenness from a carcass, or send the prayers of the desperate to heaven. Besides gold, these were the gifts the magi brought Jesus at his birth. Such a thing to give a child, a god, the only kind of person who would never need it.

I want to tell the story of my crimes: the ones I’ve committed, the ones I’ve suffered, the ones I’ve wanted to commit, the ones I thought I understood. Sometimes I want the freedom of the penitent absolved. But somewhere in the telling remorse eludes me. I am Myrrha going back night after night, and I am her father, so corrupt I mistake myself for pure. It is for me the ascetic harvests the trees’ blood. It’s worth the price of incense to smell better than you are. It was frankincense Freya Stark wrote about, but I misremember it as myrrh.

We take it for granted that people who write about the past, especially the fascinating figures of the past, deal heavily in speculation. But it takes speculation to write about people who are alive too—especially conflicts involving two or more people with different perspectives and internal ambivalences. When #MeToo began to gain traction as a movement, I began to think of stories of sexual misconduct (or that could be construed as misconduct) that had fascinated me over the years. They tended to be the least straightforward cases or those I related to in some way. One steady fact that emerges in my attempt to inhabit these narratives is the power of abuse to erase those who suffer it. Like the story of Myrrha, so many ancient Greek myths resolve this way—with a young woman running from a man; a god; a furious spurned goddess; a set of ugly, arbitrary rules—straight into oblivion. They must endure in part because we recognize the truth in that.

—

Jasmine V. Bailey photo by Stephen Grant.jpg

Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of Alexandria, Disappeared and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It. She has been an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She won the Michigan Quarterly Review's 2019 Laurence Goldstein Prize, the 2020 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize from Ruminate Magazine, was a finalist for the 2018 Gulf Coat Translation Prize, and is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

to have eaten the octopus

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Jessie Kraemer

Some things are true, I wouldn’t dispute that. But the way a mind holds fact is a funny thing, and no two do it the same. A mind can hold real things in a really unreal way.

Things we haven't seen have a way of being things we’ve already seen—as having not seen them, we imagine them in detail, with familiarity.

There is the state where I was born and lived most of my life, which upon imagining is pale. I imagine first a triangle on the east coast, and second, a farm down the road: two buffalo standing in the water behind a wire fence. One peacock roams, several baby pigs poked by squatting children. The woods beyond hold gnarled trees among what may be the little ghosts of trenches and deep buried metal nuts, or simply dirt. Only these images.

There are continents about which I contain a wild and unsubstantiated understanding grown almost exclusively from things seen in National Geographic. And then the visceral and acute pain of choking on a live octopus, nearly universal. A feeling known almost so well that we do not need to imagine a second time.

Notions are fertile. A whisper can sink damply into a soil and grow fruit, while realer seeds are eaten and forgotten.

Hair tossed like a scarf, I step from the platform alone in a burst of rivering bodies.

The Louvre is being emptied because of the summer flood. I see the man in pressed slacks tossing windy with each step as he—with dark hair and a pinched mouth—carries one end of a wooden crate of artworks. Stepping a black shoe backwards to, shining, lick the drowned cobbles, his face is unmoved, his calf, unimaginable.

People glide through the green streetwater with an earned, middle-class pep that comes from being European in the time of the bullish America. The world throws up celebratory plastics, they fall almost immediately and do not decompose.

It is the Eurocup, among the tourists and the locals dressed in neutral tones, there are colorful jerseys with numbers. Who knows what teams are playing, and who would ever know, seeing as so many countries have the colors red and white. There would have been so much red and white.

When imagined unknowns are replaced with witnessing, then comes a realness that is underwhelming, neutralizing, and eventually forgettable. To come upon the Mona Lisa is to say, this is much smaller in person.

Concerning the Mona Lisa, I’ve never been to the Louvre.

Paris, for me you canceled two trains.

Many times I imagined the journey, crossing the French border. The sheep stand puffed and coiffed, their sloping backs like their mothers’ the hills. There stand the small houses, without the dumbing solar panels and turbines of practical Germany, basking nakedly in a relentless nature.

Paris, 476 kilometers away, is both the lit cigarette and the mouth inhaling, realizing it is as well the burning of dry tobacco, as well the smoke in the lungs and the smoke curling through the labyrinthine stem of the cigarette. It is delightful to feel the uncertainty and the displaced sense of arriving, both smoking and being smoked, to see how the lit end erupts in a shine that is meandering like a thin red snake, like the sharpness on a turning coin.

Pouring back and forth into each glass to rebalance the known with the known.

When my mother was a child she sat in the front on her knees for the class picture. I know this as I hold in my hands the class picture.

I know it to look at her, the other children, anonymous and grey, their thoughts are unsaved, but her I can remember. She has white hair and a handstitched dress, and in her I see a mystic. Her stare is boiled and plain, her eyes are two skinned nuts and two black pebbles. I think, I want that child to come back and teach me to be quiet and odd.

I wonder if she hid things, what she refused to eat, if she stored small resentments.

If she did not smooth all the wrinkles from the bedclothes, there was the witch who would grab her. There were the little dolls with their tiny outfits her mother pulled from the top shelf of the linen closet only when she was home sick from school with a fever. There were the baby lambs who cried as she fed them on her lap with a bottle by the fire. The willow in the front lawn. The peach orchard rented across town where she would rub the skins up and down her arm before the rashes came.

She grew very slowly day by day, not quickly in leaps like chapters in a story. She slept seven to nine hours each night, and this would have been much of her life, a few hours of sleep each night. She rode the bus to school and sat in chairs, and this too would have been much of her life. She would sneeze and push the dirty clothes to one side of the room, and these things would have taken up moments each week. I would like to live each day in her childhood like I would visit the real Paris.

My three days a week lover beside me in the grass, I touch the eczema on his wrist, something else that comes and goes. A bee mounts a clover.

I cannot know how I’ve moved even to get here. Like the balls of moss that roll on glaciers, in Alaska, in Iceland, the colder places, the blue sheen, somewhere my feet would never travel, the mountain of still water. The sudden green on the landscape, like balled socks, are called glacier mice. A mystery I cannot solve, nor scientists.

These balls of moss must somehow roll themselves, one inch a day, to angle each curve of their oval adjacent to the sun, to keep each pearl of moss alive. The odd thing is not that they roll themselves—that we do not know how—but that they all roll together. As one mind. Marbles that someone is shuffling with a big, immaterial palm. That to see them sitting it is somehow impossible not to see them in motion, creeping forward, even as the glaciologist, the chill of the air at their nose, watches, even in a photograph, even as we see them in the magazine, even then.

To see them still, is to see them in motion, even in the photograph, even then. And to feel it bodily, like a stone, the kind that could be carved into a Mycanean vase, picturing what a Cretan imagines of an octopus, a three-petaled flower and two ribbon arms with ribs like lace, and this in the Louvre, tucked in some lit box, with a placard explaining.

“The Octopus”—it offers—not saying what it would feel like for the same to be swallowed. Not intimating that at the level of the cell, an octopus is one step ahead of us, or eight, or like a thousand liquid stars, is always intimately recreating, an octopus manifesting himself like the environment around him. He sees the room, and imagines himself candescent.

That an octopus could imagine himself exactly the texture of sand, that he could become a school of clownfish, means he could easily negotiate the thought of being sent to the restaurant kitchen. Being held up from the bucket of water, inspected, first interrogated for shape, and then separated at each limb. What he wouldn’t imagine may be the cooler skin of a glacier, what he knows of the smaller ice cube, the exposures of the sun on the water.

To come upon a Da Vinci, peering over the backs of many others to see it, one’s eyes electing to look at the pimpled light on the golden frame rather than hairless brow of the woman, may be to say, this is much smaller in person. Or I am much smaller than I thought I was.

It’s true, at least, to say that I did not see it.

To enter an unvisited place is to enter every part of its air, an omniscience, a poured jar of bees, each buzz an inimitable touch.

Calling something nonfiction will make me immediately suspicious. If you go out of your way to tell me something is true, I'm going to assume you're lying. That antagonism is what I love about an essay. It’s like a lazzi, the same failure every time. There is no True. Everyone loves a lazzi, and we keep reading essays because they’re this awful analog for how we attempt to cohere narrative about our lives. It’s a kinship with this pseudo-impossible project of understanding the world.

Speculation is the currency of the essay, is any movement in the text, because if we only wrote confidently forward about what we knew to be true, there would be no essay. Some things are true, I wouldn’t dispute that. But the way a mind holds fact is a funny thing, and no two do it the same. A mind can hold real things in a really unreal way. All that’s there are stars, and we see constellations. A trick you learn is that beginning anything with “I imagine” makes it nonfiction. The fact of writing the fiction was true. But putting the focus there changes things: then we are watching you do it.

—

Jessie Kraemer is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, where she is co-editor of The Essay Review and teaches undergrads to like books. Her work can be found in Essay Daily.

Burning Officers

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Alice Nelson

The speculative essay is also a small kingdom of digressive freedom, where personal memory and tectonic shifts of history can find a place beside each other, where dispossessions and erasures of all kinds can intertwine and refract.

At the old Paravur synagogue in Cochin, the villagers have taken away all the gravestones to use as washing stones. They are the perfect size and shape. I imagine the river water flowing across the carved Hebrew letters. The press and slap of wet cloth against the old stone. A desecration, a travesty. But to the villagers it was not sacrilege, you said. Think of all those crumbling buildings in Bombay, ghostly banyan trees bursting through their hearts. India is a country where bodies are burned, not buried, where there are no graves. As bodies disperse into the air, so too should buildings decay and disappear. A return to formlessness. They would be effaced anyway, the letters on those gravestones, by time and by weather. In the end they are only stones.

Our desires always go far beyond the object of desire, you tell me. Desire is metonymy, mirror; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. Monsoon season. It is raining extravagantly and we are lying in bed together in the middle of the afternoon. I watch the spread of my hair across your chest, your fingers twisting a strand of it; how novel and miraculous it feels to be in such proximity to you. Let me have this, I want to say to you, this very specific object of desire. This particular body.

Bombay. You insist on the old name. Mumbai is where you go for a business meeting, Bombay is where you meet a lover.

From the edge of our garden in India you can see a mountain range that looks like a sleeping elephant. I show you, drawing the shape of it with my finger; the great sweep of the back, the long trunk. The weight and certitude of an elephant, you say softly. It’s from a Barbara Ras poem; later she writes about mad breaking-heart stickiness. There’s a photograph of the two of us standing at the edge of the valley, silhouettes in the afternoon haze, both wearing wide-brimmed hats. We had not ever touched each other then.

Dunwich, where you live, was once one of Europe’s most important ports. A merchant town, a trading town, second only to London in the Middle Ages, full of churches, convents and monasteries. Slowly, year after year, the city slipped into the sea. The storm tides, the crumbling cliff face, the incursions of the ocean. Every kind of defence was built against the sea; stones and sand shovelled away furiously, elaborate sea walls constructed and reinforced. But none of it was any good and the townspeople were forced to retreat inland. Now Dunwich lies under the sea like a lost Atlantis. It is said that on some stormy nights the church bells can be heard pealing beneath the waves.

We forgive everything of a lover, Ondaatje wrote. We forgive selfishness, desire, guile—as long as we are the motive for it. But can we forgive these things of ourselves? Deceit, disloyalty, slyness. How swiftly I learn to lie, how fluently lie after lie spills out of my lips as if I had miraculously mastered a foreign language, or a very complicated piano concerto. How easily we let go of the things we had once held as truths about ourselves. But perhaps we never move past who we essentially are. It’s a kind of wishfulness to imagine that somehow at our cores we are better people than those we turn out to be. That we are merely bent sideways by the burden of our circumstances.

Being with you, and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time. —Jorge Luis Borges

Sometimes you speak about the blueberries you picked in the woods as a child, or the way your mother made tea with fresh ginger, and the past presses in on us. Shifting borders, the names of towns changed, villages razed, cemeteries covered over with new roads. Names lost too; the long unfurling foreignness of your father’s name cut away to create something more palatable for a new life in a new country. Swallowed histories, dismantled pasts. No wonder it turned you into a collector, an archivist, a rescuer of every lost thing.

The burden of our circumstances. You say this when what you should really say is that we hold the lives of others in our hands. That we wield the power of devastation.

I tell you about the place they call the graveyard of statues. After British rule ended, the city found itself with all manner of statues and monuments to various high-born Englishmen that didn't seem appropriate to the new post-colonial Indian city. So they moved all the statues to a garden outside the Prince of Wales Museum and arranged them in congenial circles, so that they could commune with each other. There seemed to me something so tender and solicitous about this. Perhaps there’s a place like this where you and I could meet. A room, a garden, a bench by the sea. Where everything can be forgiven.

The first book you lent me; a collection of Rilke’s letters about Cezanne. It seemed such an illicit thrill; to smuggle this small piece of you inside my house. Just as potent as the smell of you on my clothes, my hands, my hair. I kept staring at the slim volume-a little tattered, pages folded down here and there. Some sentences were underlined in pencil. The way that Cezanne made saints out of the objects he painted, the apples and the wine bottles. A paragraph on the interdependence of colours in his landscapes; as if every place knew about all the others. I don’t know what became of that book. I don’t remember returning it to you, but I don’t have it any longer.

There is one grave left on the cliff’s edge in the old churchyard of All Saints above Dunwich Beach. They have constructed a fence around it, as if this might protect it from slipping into the sea. One the other side of the cliff path, sheep move through the ruins of the Greyfriars monastery.

Once I drew a map of your garden. This was before I had been to your house in Dunwich so it was a dream map, spun entirely from your recountings. The ancient oriental plane tree whose boughs reach down to touch the ground. The row of linden trees at the bottom of the garden. The old greenhouse with its listing frame and warped glass. The holly bush where the neighbour’s tortoiseshell cat liked to retreat in the afternoons. The beds full of snowdrops, asters, phlox, dahlias. Flowers grown and tended by your wife, though you never said this. I pinned the map to the wall above my desk, but sometimes I cannot bear to look at it.

You have never made me a cup of tea. Would not know how long to steep the leaves, how much milk to pour. It seems a necessary form of knowledge.

There is an Elizabeth Bishop poem about a moose that took her twenty years to write. I read it to you one evening over the telephone. It’s long and you are very silent as I read, so silent I think the line has been cut off. We are a long way apart, our words carried over waves. I imagine you sitting at your desk, watching the sky darkening in the fields beyond the garden. Your listening heart. Two long decades of keeping company with one poem. The same length as your marriage. Twice the length of mine.

At a market in France, I buy antique linen embroidered with the initials of long-dead women. Sheets, pillowcases, once a ruffled nightdress with the name Claire stitched above the heart. My husband finds it baffling and somewhat morbid; it’s difficult for me explain to him that I can’t bear for these things be lost to history. So much about me is bewildering to my husband; sometimes I think that with each year of our marriage I grow stranger and more incomprehensible to him. In our linen closet the heavy sheets are folded carefully, with little cloth parcels of French lavender pressed between them.

Some of the gifts you brought me: a smooth stone from the shingle beach at Dunwich, a crab apple from the tree in your garden, a sprig of lilac heather. I kept the stone for many years on my desk.

Every time you speak the word home in my presence I feel it as a wound. One small word that bears the power to turn me queasy with loss. A little stab between the ribs. There are words we carefully excise from our vocabulary by some unspoken agreement. The word we, when it doesn’t refer to you and me. Two names.

Sometimes I grow weary of the weight of dragging my soul around in the world. I tell you this during one of our long telephone conversations and we both laugh. We are always laughing. After we hang up you send me an article about a physician who tried to scientifically determine whether the soul had weight. He chose several patients and weighed them on a minutely calibrated scale just before their death and immediately afterwards. One of the patients lost 21 grams in those few moments, leading the physician to speculate that this was the precise weight of the human soul. He also weighed 15 dogs immediately after their deaths but none of their bodies lost any weight. Twenty-one grams doesn’t seem so heavy darling, you wrote.

In one of our very first conversations about music all those years ago in the garden in India, you told me that Adorno had once written that in Mahler happiness flourishes on the brink of catastrophe. All these clues to yourself, scattered like breadcrumbs. I should have been a better student.

The last letter you ever sent me. Not even a letter, but an envelope containing a sepia photograph of the Gateway to India. The photograph had been taken to commemorate the departure of the last British troops from India after independence. But the choice of the image struck me as rather heavy-handed and obvious, rather unlike you. I thought perhaps it was evidence of your distress. Stricken and despairing, you had reached for a less sophisticated metaphor than you would usually employ, in the way that people often resort to cliché at moments of great emotion. But later I remembered a conversation we once had about the way that before the British left India they destroyed every shred of compromising evidence, every questionable record. There were great fires in the square of the Red Fort in Delhi, conflagrations that burned through the day and night. I remember you telling me that those tasked with this swift and determined destruction were called ‘burning officers’. There was no photograph you could send me of this furtive erasure, so instead you choose an image of the official ceremonial departure, the commemorated farewell.

What would we conceal or deny now that we had agreed that we must part? What versions of our histories would we take forth into the world?

In one of your essays you wrote at some length about Corsican funeral rites; the way that after a death the doors and shutters of the house are closed and sometimes the whole façade is painted black. The dramatic character of this appealed to me. A grief so consuming it needed to be made plain for all to see.

We were so careful to leave no trace of ourselves in each other’s lives. Two wineglasses on the sink, a long dark hair on the pillow, an earring lost between the sheets; small but devastating hand grenades. But I wonder if the places we have been together persist in remembering us, if they hold our presence silently. Some almost impalpable aura. Like a temple or a small country church. Something hallowed.

Wiesengrund wrote of Mahler that his music was the cardiogram of a breaking heart.

We are, all of us, revisionist historians. Not just those who have something to hide.

The night jasmine is blooming and I want to write to tell you.

In Corsica, small dwellings are built for the dead, and the living visit to talk with them, to ask their advice, to bring them news.

The enormous and terrible discipline of grief that must be unseen.

A single smooth stone, found on a shingle beach and many years later placed on a grave.

Once you told me that during the summer evenings of your childhood you watched the swallows circling and imagined they held the world together by the courses they traced through the air.

Natalie Diaz once wrote that the space between poems becomes a kingdom she wanders; a place for her griefs and anxieties to move in new ways—”unashamed and unafraid to be seen into.” The speculative essay is also a small kingdom of digressive freedom, where personal memory and tectonic shifts of history can find a place beside each other, where dispossessions and erasures of all kinds can intertwine and refract. Where what is not written must also be heard, and where the silences between the passages speak of the limits of expression and the way that every story is a kind of iceberg—with vast portions submerged beneath our knowing. The speculative essay, with its mutability, its form-resisting fluidity, its embrace of ambiguities of all kinds, seems the perfect medium for the speculative undertaking that is love itself. And when that love is wrenched into grief, it is a realm where it is possible to find buried within the history of what did not happen a way of preserving the essential traces that remain.

—

Alice Nelson is an Australian writer. She was named Best Young Australian Novelist of the year for her first novel, The Last Sky, and has also published a non-fiction book called After This. Her most recent novel, The Children’s House, published by Random House in 2018, has received widespread critical and popular acclaim and is being translated into other languages. The novel was long-listed for the Australian Independent Bookseller’s Award for Fiction, the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal. Alice’s short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Sydney Review of Books, The Asia Literary Review, Southerly Magazine, Australian Book Review and the West Australian Newspaper.

Invisible mending (a disintegrated essay)

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Peta Murray and David Carlin

We have wandered and wondered into the impossibility of imagining what is to be old, following threads that have arisen through exchanges of micro-essays, emails, and conversations.

NOTE TO THE READER: The following is all that is left of a much longer essay (in fact, the manuscript for an entire book), which one of us—it doesn’t matter who; we take joint responsibility—left in the pocket of a garment that went through the wash and out the other side. We offer it as a warning against forgetfulness and a sincere if threadbare enquiry into how to dress for old age.

Old age is often seen as a time of diminishing

unfortunately, not symmetrically.

After the verses and the chorus

there is only one possible out(fit) for the end.

Amen.

In childhood demarcations

Little boys

Little girls

the adjustments how much flesh which bits.

endlessly negotiating

We look for all the places time has left its

softening

Short sleeves now unbecoming.

inevitable

trajectory of ebbing.

Try this, you’ll feel

better.

I’m-not-dead-yet compensations.

Mixed messages or what?

beige—

a short word

colourless colour.

a turning down of brown.

Beige has to start again.

My hand is a beautiful colour.

cast off my inner whiteness and embrace my outer beige?

Here is dour. The costume of the patriarch.

so many men

forever looking away into a middle distance

an emotional taboo that leaks

stone faced

What a price

A maternal grandmother

so ancient you cannot countenance

Dear drear - her bleach and her hoarding

cut price Sao Biscuits

a sip of tea, a bite of soft bread, a sip of tea bliss.

A picture of a man containing dour.

lips thin and sharp

in the morning walking left to right and in the evening right to left,

mistaken for something fragile, brittle, and ultimately transparent.

At last!

ugg boots, trakky dacks, T-shirt, an old grey jumper,

A cuppa tea.

I don’t go out in my ugg boots. That is taking it too far.

comfiest

My late father-in-law’s blue turtle neck jumper

pop my head through

I have my elders’ arms around me

Because life is harsh.

All mirrors should be turned away.

The point of comfy

fluffy-toed sartorial oblivion

Day wear. Night wear. Wear and tear.

one’s hands too arthritic to fiddle at zips and buttons

And surely, with the wrinkling

the weight of gravity and time.

Comfy says: really?

take the odd nip of whisky, for medicinal purposes round 6pm at night.

Or wear the rebellion

spectacular shoes, or a flower in your hair

durational practice

quintessence of wearer

shorthand for personhood

and I pass the test of being me

an artform in its own right.

7. I am going through a phase, you may have deduced

androgynous femme black hair dye Francophile try-

to-dress-like-an-artist let-it-all-go-grey

Do men have these?

This is not rhetorical

My queen and king.

Not just for the heels

the big hair,

not just for the frocks

the frou-frou

but for the wit

it,

the sly take

on not staying

where

one

put.

the sheer density of attention.

when we are old, who will give us this?

a single metal press-stud at the cusp of memory and language

my mother with her back to me, and me supposedly asleep in bed watching her at the sewing

machine, purring with her foot, cradled in the light, alone with her sorrow.

I still long to be dapper, truth be told.

boater hat, hatband, necktie, crisp shirt, wingtip collar.

waistcoat, buttoned, plaid blazer, boutonnière, trousers, two-tone brogues

complete

my father as a young man in the city streets, mid-stride glowing with
blond youthfulness and kitted out

he never lived to grow old, a romantic purity in being unrevised,

undisputed, as it were, by later looks.

10.

birthmarks, disfigurements, other signs

I’d love to be made over, I truly would.

To be youthful is a thing.

To be “oldthful” is a word spoken by someone with their dentures out.

Ha ha some old fool…

11. Every home should have a dress-up box

let loose admirals and vamps, duchesses and nymphs something we still contain but
seldom find chances to reveal

escape, from the confinement of image, prison of oneself.

It is the more that entices me

comical dressing gowns preposterous slippers. risky business catch our eyes,

glimpse one-part embarrassment meets two-parts gall.

despite,

again and again the disappointing news broken to us.

this does not exist. that is not how things are.

protest inwardly, or learn to acquiesce, the suit of reality enclosing
gaps and mysteries one by one patched

zipped

or otherwise sealed over

from day one, squeeze into a dressed-up world, a violent, miserable pantomime

12.

a little soft shoe shuffle, as slow as she likes.
a back-of-the-auditorium grin.

Glamour! Approach with caution.

We, the untucked, the wizening, the chicken-winged, the spinnakered,

Ah, the

ancient glamours we will show you!

The book manuscript alluded to in the introduction to our essay actually exists, albeit as a work in progress. Called How to Dress for Old Age, it is a collaboration speculative in both content and the processes that have given it form. We have wandered and wondered into the impossibility of imagining what is to be old, following threads that have arisen through exchanges of micro-essays, emails, and conversations. In Invisible Mending, we take up with perverse delight the opportunity for a new phase in the experiment that has seen us shrink 40,000 words into a mere 800. Then, in keeping with domestic measures that in many ways may be seen to be counter-erasure—the mending kit, the sewing box, the iron-on patch—we endeavour to leave enough of this remnant intact to retain some trace of design and shape, while at the same time exposing our aging frames beneath the fabric of the words.

—

Peta Murray is a writer-performer and teacher, best known for her plays, Wallflowering and Salt. Recent works include Missa Pro Venerabilibus: A Mass for The Ageing, and the live art-based performance piece, vigil/wake. As a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, Peta’s focus is the application of transdisciplinary arts-based practices as modes of inquiry and forms of cultural activism. She is particularly interested in the application of “meaningful irreverence” as a means to navigate change. Critical writing includes contributions to Axon, Fourth Genre, New Writing, RUUKKU and TEXT.

David Carlin’s books include The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019, with Nicole Walker), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019), The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015) and Our Father Who Wasn’t There (2010), and two anthologies of new Asian and Australian writing, The Near and the Far, Vols 1&2 (2016, 2019). His award-winning essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Hunger Mountain, Overland, Westerly, Terrain.org, Essay Daily, TEXT Journal, and New Writing. David is Professor of Creative Writing and co-director of WrICE and the non/fictionLab at RMIT University, and the Co-President of the international NonfictioNOW Conference.

Una donna (1906)

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Rina Faccio, born in 1867, was one of those girls of the late 19th century whose fate required little imagination. It was only a question of the order in which verbs and surnames would be imposed upon her.

Rina Faccio, b. 1876

As a girl, Rina Faccio lived in Porto Civitanova and did what she was told. Her father told her to work in the accounting department of his factory, and she did it. She was twelve years old, dutiful, with long dark hair. Then her mother told her something wordlessly that she never forgot. Her mother was standing at the window, looking out, in a white dress that hung off her shoulders. Then suddenly her mother went out the window. She fell like a scrap of paper. Her body landed two floors down, bent into a bad shape. That was what Rina Faccio’s mother had to say to her.

Nira and Reseda, 1892

Nira was the first time that Rina changed her name. She wanted to write for the provincial local papers, but she was afraid that her father would find out. In the early days we didn’t know how much we needed to change.

When Rina Faccio turned fifteen, she grew out of anagrams. She chose the name Reseda because it reminded her of recita, which means, she plays her role, she recites her part. When her father thundered in the drawing-room about the opinions of these hussies, whoever they were, appearing in print, Rina Faccio looked up from her needlepoint as blank as a page.

Rina Faccio, 1892

Despite having been told by her mother, Rina Faccio didn’t know it was going to happen. She was obediently adding and subtracting numbers about the factory, keeping the ledgers in straight lines. A man who worked at the factory was moving in circles around her. He had brute hands that fastened on levers, a breath that crawled up the back of her neck. She didn’t see him until the circles were very tight around her and then it was too late. Her dress was shoved up. She cried out, but only the brute palm of his hand could have heard her.

Rina Pierangeli Faccio, 1893-1895

In the winter her father forced her to marry that man and take his name.

Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gave birth to the child of that man. It was a son. Shortly thereafter she found the bottle of laudanum and wordlessly took all of it.

The laudanum didn’t kill Rina Pierangeli Faccio, but it ended her name.

The Pisanelli Code, 1865

All of the politicians hailed the Pisanelli Code as a triumph of the unification of Italy. The new state was eager to grow into its full shape, stretching the length of the entire peninsula and covering the populace with its laws. As one politician said, We made Italy; now we have to make the Italians.

Under the Pisanelli Code women gained two memorable rights: we could make wills to distribute our property after our own deaths, and our daughters could inherit things from us. Our writing before death had never seemed so important. We began to consider what things we possessed, and whether to bequeath them to our daughters was a vile shackling to the past, or rather some small gift that could be pawned for a future.

Amendment to the Pisanelli Code, 1877

The rights we didn’t have in Italy were the same rights we hadn’t had for centuries, and thus not worth enumerating, but in 1877, a modification to the Pisanelli Code allowed us to act as witnesses. Then, too, we were beginning to notice how the outlines of our doorways and dowries were matched up, so that one box could be carried through another, signifying the transfer of a bride. No one could leave a marriage, but some of us could discern the shape that it made of our lives. As one politician said at that time, In Italy, the enslavement of women is the only regime in which men may live happily. He meant that we ourselves were the small gift, pawned for the future of the fatherland.

Rina, c. 1901-1902

In those uncertain years Rina and her sister went to the theater in Milano, which was so crowded that they could barely find their seats. The play was Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the story of a woman named Nora who ceases finally to be a wife. In the last act, Nora leaves her house, her husband, and her children, clicking the latch of the door behind her with a sound like a century snapping shut. After the play, Rina’s sister went home to her husband in Rome and Rina stayed on in Milano, writing.

Nora, 1891

A Doll’s House had first come to Italy in the form of the actress Eleonora Duse. She was already famous when she swept into a theater in Milano in 1891, thirty-two years old, melancholy and determined. On the cold stage she took off her hat and furs and, bowing her head, had a chain put round her neck with heavy keys on it. The tines of the keys hung down to the tops of her thighs, so that every step she took made the sound of keys and chains, chains and keys. On opening night, tickets to see her cost twice what they should, and still the theater was creaking with bodies all the way up to the balconies. Then the curtain went up, and Eleonora Duse became Nora.

Sibilla, 1902

What Rina was writing was the beginnings of Sibilla. In 1902 Rina Faccio left her house, that man, the child, and her name. She went to live in Rome and fell in love with a distinguished novelist. When the novelist asked her name, she said it was Sibilla. Under the Pisanelli Code her conduct was inexcusable: no one could leave a marriage, but especially not a wife and a mother.

Rina disappeared. Sibilla kept writing.

Sibilla Aleramo, b. 1906

In 1906 Una donna was published. As the title indicates, it was a book that was also a woman. In fact it was the story of a woman whose mother goes out the window like a scrap of paper, whose father forces her to marry that man, whose body is broken by laudanum and stifled cries. It was the story of a woman not named Nora who ceases finally to be a wife.

Sibilla Aleramo was born in 1906 when the first copy of the book was published in Torino. She held the book in her hands. It was not like a baby. It was not like a bottle of laudanum. It was a solid object, the volume of a life. Una donna was the sustenance of Sibilla as she came into the world, unblinking, thirty years old. It was the story she told herself of herself, like a Sybil who eats her own words.

Rina Faccio, born in 1867, was one of those girls of the late 19th century whose fate required little imagination. It was only a question of the order in which verbs and surnames would be imposed upon her. But Rina Faccio, having been submitted to the worst of those verbs by 1900, decided to erase herself. She wrote herself out of the story she had been assigned, paradoxically, by writing it all down and publishing it as an autobiographical novel called Una donna [A Woman]. Her book was itself a feminist experiment in speculative nonfiction: intimate, political, prophetic, performative. Writing Una donna changed her name; publishing it made Sibilla Aleramo a founding figure of Italian feminism. In this poetic retelling of her story, I have drawn on the first-person details of her book and on queer feminist historiography. But I have also made inside her “I” a little place for a “we”—an impossible, collective witnessing of her becoming.

—

Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and their Afterlives (University of Michigan Press, 2019), a current Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature (Italian/French); her articles have appeared in Women & Performance, PAJ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Her first piece of creative nonfiction was recently published in Lammergeier, and she is at work on a speculative collective biography of queer feminists in turn-of-the-century Europe.

Sites of Departure

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Jessica Watson

Speculation itself is a site of departure from our usual way of truth-telling, but so long as our thoughts blend past, present, and future, they contain speculation.

The faces of the living and the dead surface in episodes, abrupt and clarion, like strange objects that suddenly appear hovering in front of me. They often dissolve as soon as they appear. But sometimes their faces stay with me for the day. Their faces are artifacts surfacing from a middens on the shore of Lake Harney, or drowned in the sinkhole of Little Salt Spring that divers probe and retrieve: an arrow-head, a stone knife, a piece of clay flue. Sometimes the vividness of the image is shockingly pleasant, the memory a thing of marvel. At other times, I sink into trepidation that lasts until the memory fades. Gaunt-faced, round-faced, pale, bearded, cherubic, jaundiced, ashen. Kind faces, lonely faces, friendly, warm and cold.

Within the first year of my first nursing job, I learned the post-mortem checklist by rote. I became adept at rolling people into body bags, remembering to zip the bag head to foot so that those that followed, like the mortician, only had to unzip an inch to check the toe tag. Perhaps in an effort to exert some type of order on the situation, I always made an attempt to tie the chin-strap included in the post-mortem kit, in a bow tie to keep the mouth closed, but sometimes people had been intubated for so long that their jaws were too stiff. In the quiet moments at the bedside, room stripped of IV poles and pumps, bedding balled up and tossed in the hamper, shoes squeaking where IV fluids leaked, after family had left with the contact info for the morgue, as I prepared someone for the afterlife, I felt myself begin to unfurl.

From out of this feeling of death, I went home and the neighborhood trees bathed me in peace. When I stood in their proximity, watering the passionflower climbing my chain link fence, or sitting on my stoop, calm swept over me. I could begin to forget those faces, the ones that went to the morgue, the ones that suffered through encephalopathy, sepsis, organ failure. Strangely, my heart would patter excitedly with hope and anticipation. The trees made me anticipate something that I wanted dearly. When I stood on the stoop at night and gazed at the giant live oak across the street I felt a channel of communication open up. All I wanted was to pry it further open.

Recently, I moved across state. I’ve left the job and the tree, but my memory brings me back again and again to those sites of departure, where my self split in two at the locus of each choice. Choices like branches, branching and branching again and again until I can no longer see the ground below me. I’ve thought more than I should about the trees and the unit where I worked. Every time I remember, the memory runs through the same valley in my brain, like the moles that burrowed under the house and through the yard, leaving mounds of tunnels that collapsed like pastries under my feet, pushing up pieces of glass with their naked shovel hands. Memories are like moles that way. One night you go to sleep and the next day you wake up miles away, standing at the bedside with the chaplain.

From across the state, I like to imagine the tree still standing there. I can picture it fully, candelabra limbs loaded with resurrection fern spiraling upwards into the blinding sky. I imagine the boughs still strung with the same lineage of 19th century Spanish moss. If I listen, I can hear the tree creaking, stretching its limbs even wider still, wider than a house, wider than a city block. The sulci of its bark becoming more deeply etched, prop roots bulging, gigantic arms straining to hold their weight as new communities of fern and moss, weevils and treehoppers, red-tailed hawk and blue jays, cover the tree with life. I like to think that when people walk past it, coming from the new restaurants and brewery a few blocks away, having arguments or worried about their future, that they become flooded with calm at the same moment they fall into its shadow. For one moment, their feet tread over layers of the past tangled in its roots, and a channel opens up.

This essay begins with recurring visions of patients I’ve cared for in the past. I recognize how much my dreams and memories of these experiences as a nurse have collected and formed a life of their own, seeming to exist in a separate reality at times. As I attended to a landscape of memory (the faces of my patients), I thought of landscapes I’d visited with historic links to the past. In this essay, I imagine sites of departure, not as escape from reality, but as points of connection between people, moments and places that command our attention: the bedside, memory, dreams, nature and the vestiges of history around us that remind us of a shared past. Speculation itself is a site of departure from our usual way of truth-telling, but so long as our thoughts blend past, present, and future, they contain speculation. In this essay, erasure represents the opposite of remembering, the opposite of conjuring and attending to a moment in time, a person gone.

—

Jessica Watson is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of South Florida. She holds degrees in Nursing and Ecology from UM and UCONN, respectively. Her writing themes include mental health, music, the body, nursing and nature. She's currently working on a book of essays that embody one person's experience and observations as a nurse of illness, medicine, and mental health. You can read her previous work in Mud Season Review and Sweetlit.

Comparative Obliterature: Two Examples

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Andrew Sunshine

But that erasure—gradual, unremarkable, unchecked so far—is an extraordinary emblem of human indifference, mindlessness. Are we to suppose that it can be without cosmic consequences?

When Rabbi Low saw that the work of his hands had run amok, he knew what must be done. The man he had made must be undone.

What was the golem’s undoing?

Rabbi Low fetched his ladder, stood it by the giant, ascended to the highest rung, and deleted, letter by letter, the Tetragrammaton inscribed upon his brow.

When the first letter had vanished, the man stood stock still.

When the second letter was gone, the light vanished from his eyes and neither his pulse nor his heart could beat any longer.

When the final letter was removed, the man’s form crumbled utterly to dust.

That is the pattern and the rite. Thus, every year on Purim, to celebrate their salvation long ago from the evil Haman, Jews chalk their persecutor’s name on the soles of their shoes, pressing and twisting them into the floor to rub out the letters of his name to forget him forever again.

If you can write it, you can obliterate it. That is why it is forbidden to write the name of God.

The central administrative building at the university where I work, a rotunda with a grand portico atop a prominence overlooking the campus, is called Low Library, built by Seth Low, a former president of the University, in memory of his father. Needless to say, this Low is not to be confused with Rabbi Low which is really Loew or Löw or Loeb or Löb or Leyb, that is, ‘lion’.

The lion happens to be the mascot of the University, but the institutional seal is graced with the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the letters of God’s name, the letters which compose the universe. A man in a lion costume prances about at varsity football games, but far from the stadium, the University seal is a brass inlay set into the marble floor of Low Library’s lobby. For more than a century, this seal has been trodden underfoot and the Tetragrammaton it encompasses is visibly worn away:

What is the meaning of this?

Who is the architect, the choreographer, of this casual desecration?

Who will answer for it?

Who among us will take the Name from the floor and find for it a tomb?

We who go about our business in the world of human affairs, however wholesome or indifferent our routines may be, effect much violence and destruction, pain and suffering. We wake up in the morning, fix a cup of coffee, and bring worlds to the brink of their doom.

Perhaps the sort of archaic speculation about language enshrined in the legend of Rabbi Low and the Golem of Prague is not up to today’s industry standards. To link it with a modern instance of erasing (or defacing) God’s name may therefore seem to exceed speculation and enter the realm of implausible fantasy: no cataclysm could possibly result from wearing down the letters in a brass emblem in the halls of a secular institution. But that erasure—gradual, unremarkable, unchecked so far—is an extraordinary emblem of human indifference, mindlessness. Are we to suppose that it can be without cosmic consequences?

—

Andrew Sunshine is the author of Andra moi (Ambitus Books). Recent work has appeared in Map Literary, Panoplyzine, and Wild Roof. He is co-editor (with Donna Jo Napoli) of Tongue’s Palette: Poetry by Linguists and editor of The Alembic Space: Writings on Poetics and Translation by Joseph Malone (both from Atlantis-Centaur). He lives in New York City with his wife and, when they are passing through, his two sons.

revision

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Sarah Heady

It’s too late for any of us to have upbringings other than the ones we had, but we can begin to actively speculate about what could have been different, to reveal what was actually true all along, and to hope for new futures.

[2003]

[1] bedtime for a high schooler, if the first bell rings at 7:20 am and the torturous rural school bus journey begins an hour before.

[2] when i go home now, i do fawn over its dutch taverns and washington-really-did-sleep-here character. its cheese shops in place of pawn. i am no longer a resident but a consumer of the town and its whiteness, which i can only see from a distance.

[3] she was blonde to my brunette. we liked to believe there was a betty-and-veronica fantasy trope circulating around school, and perhaps there was.

[4] what i’m leaving out is the image of those adult couples getting into their cars and returning home. the terrors of dullness and domesticity are much sharper for me now; i am much closer to those “boring” people huddled under umbrellas than i am to my teenage self.

[5] i learned a few years later, waiting tables over college summers, that there was a restaurant owner who functioned doubly as employer and slumlord, presiding over rundown houses on the outskirts of town where dozens of his employees, all latino men, lived five-to-a-bedroom and worked sixteen-hour days, rotating between his three establishments (“concepts,” as they say in the business). later, one of those restaurants burned to the ground (no one was hurt). its charred shell still stands on route 9.

[6] apparently, strange noises used to be thrilling, functioning as markers of change or art.

[7] i was a stagehand for local youth shakespeare productions: sites of unbridled sexuality such as i have not seen before or since. i fetishized the image of myself all in black, whispering into the headset, blue clamp light on my face.

[8] he must have been old enough that we felt a dangerous lift in our stomachs at the thought of speaking to him, but young enough to be intrigued, or at the very least, amused, by the sight of two seventeen-year-olds fawning over him. let’s say he was twenty-one.

[9] the ultimate marker of virility, we thought at the time.

[10] owned by a notorious racist, though i can’t point to a specific incident. (and how could i truly know, given my white face?)

[11] i would buy my first car that spring (red ’91 mazda protégé), hit my first deer in the fall, and get rear-ended one black-iced morning on the way to school the following january. these largely cosmetic injuries never jeopardized my life or my livelihood, as both occurred at well under 30 mph: one of the many ways in which a certain brand of rural living carries privilege in its evasion of high-speed, high-density driving. our town was never severed by an interstate.

[12] it is said that there are only two kinds of stories: one where a stranger comes to town, the other where a journey is taken. both exist in this particular narrative. only, as a teenager, i could not see the boy’s suddenly leaving as part of his journey. he was a prop in the story of my short life; when he left the bench next to foster’s, he ceased to exist. just as a quaint village consumes everything around it, a black hole nullifying alternative narratives, futures.

[13] of course, no buses stop in rhinebeck, new york, and they probably never will. such x-factor arrivals, unfulfilled needs and difficulties in tow, would be intolerable to the village. if this were written after all the greyhound trips i’ve taken since—from cleveland to albany, from nashville to cleveland, from cleveland to philadelphia—i would have understood that.

[14] who are you, really? who would i be now if i’d gone away with you that night, if i’d left that sleepy (unawake) town? if i’d let you illuminate what i didn’t even know was illegible?

In annotating this piece of writing from high school, I’m attempting to tell my young self things that nobody else told her. I’ve been writing about growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley region, a place prized for its pastoral beauty, its “cute” towns, its “peacefulness”—which are all code for a certain type of white rural society. In this case, it’s one that can be quite self-congratulatory about its supposed open-mindedness. I think a lot about Robin DiAngelo’s articulation, in White Fragility, to the effect that the very existence of a segregated white community implies that “everything we need is already here; there is nothing of value outside of this place.” This message conflicts with the superficial celebration of diversity that got communicated in my 1990s-era schooling, and it’s certainly an erasure—a moral and spiritual impoverishment that mirrors and feeds the literal impoverishment of communities of color. It’s too late for any of us to have upbringings other than the ones we had, but we can begin to actively speculate about what could have been different, to reveal what was actually true all along, and to hope for new futures. How would places like my hometown be altered if racial justice were fully realized? Would its existence even be possible?

—

Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of Corduroy Road (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2020), Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), and Tatted Insertion, a letterpress chapbook with artist Leah Virsik. She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a new opera about the death and life of a women’s college, with composer Joshua Groffman. Her manuscript “Comfort” was a finalist for the 2019 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the 2017 National Poetry Series. Sarah is a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com.

Clea by Antonia Wallace

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Colin Hamilton

Speculative Book Reviews

Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read. We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation. Traditional reviews of nonfiction books that utilize speculation are also welcome.

Among Antonia Wallace’s six largely unread books, perhaps the least appreciated and most unread is Clea, which imagines a future in which scientific leaps, anchored in gene editing, pharmaceutical precision and surgical enhancement, have allowed humans to alter any number of physical imperfections and fragilities, through which we first escape aging and ultimately the necessity of death itself, although it continues to linger, wolf-like, on the margins of society, occasionally making an unexpected, violent entry into this otherwise protected time.

In this era of dystopian obsession, a different author might imagine a world in which everyone is granted permanent youth apocalyptically. It’s not hard to project the angles: the exhaustion of natural resources that goes into sustaining endless life; the infinities of boredom that accumulate like barnacles on the years; the nihilistic thrill-seeking of the near immortal; the supremist ideology that progressively narrows the gene pool to a singular ideal of perfection. (I was just reading a review of a new book, Chana Porter’s The Seep, in which an alien entity discretely invades Earth, solving all of our problems and eliminating our humanity in the process...) The society Wallace describes, however, is mostly idyllic, and her future, by any historic standard, is a well fed and tolerant place. But.

But despite all the promise of eternal youth and a generous diet of anti-depressant-infused beef-like proteins, there are in Wallace’s future still some who fall victim to “a mind of winter” and indulge an inner compulsion not just to give into their own decline but to embrace all that it means to age and weaken, to die. These people, “the rotters” as they are called, are deeply disturbing to their robust, beautiful peers, and are perceived as another virus in their midst to be expelled, a societal glitch, a flawed algorithm.

Most are shunned and driven away like lepers of another age, but Wallace’s world retains our dual reaction to horror, both repulsion and, for some, an irrepressible compulsion to pull back the curtain. To touch it. Beneath the elegant, logical sheen of this world, a sub-culture has developed in which those who embrace their own ends become something akin to performance artists, enacting their decline in the far corners of a dark web or through secret cabarets for the entertainment of voyeurs. The most popular rotters amass cult-like followings, existing somewhere between Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” and YouTube Svengalis.

Wallace’s story is told through the experience of Justine, an accomplished physicist who, despite her evident vim and vigor, has lived far into her second century. Intrigued by the rumors she’s heard and perhaps by some primordial stirring in her enhanced hippocampi, one night she ventures with a crowd of colleagues into one of the underground, velveteen clubs where the aging gather and the curious stray. There she sees Clea.

Generations of middle-age men in both fiction and reality have found themselves unnerved by adolescent flowering, and the story of their humiliating, doomed pursuit is one we know well. Wallace inverts this tale: restored Justine is fixated by Clea’s exotic pallor, by the unknown liver spots that, leopard-like, ascend her arms, by the charms of her dry cough, by the coarseness of her grey hair. Every description is written in a way that eroticizes Clea’s mortality, while marking Justine’s robust health as sterile, scentless and numb.

“Clea,” Wallace said in an interview I found buried deep online after nearly giving up my search, “is my rejection of the cult of possibilities in favor of the hard church of difficult pleasures. I find the young exhausting, but even worse are mid-level, middle age executives wearing shorts and baseball caps or grown couples on dates at Disney movies. Homes in which ‘young adult’ fiction comprises the only dozen books, displayed beside staged family photos in matching polo shirts. I’m appalled by adults who are applauded for speaking the truth when all they’ve actually done is throw a childish tantrum. There was a time when we strove toward rites of passage, celebrated them, when we fought to be accepted as the adults we’re becoming, but increasingly I feel as though an entire generation, maybe three, would reject all the terrifying freedom of maturity for one long suck on the teat. It’s as though, given another bite of the apple, we’ve opted to Edenic ignorance instead.”

For Justine’s curiosity seeking friends, the evening’s entertainment is a daring and momentary distraction, and they quickly return to the simple lives they’d been leading, but the image of Clea in all her doomed glory has somehow attached itself to Justine and begins to infect her. In her physics journals, Justine finds herself drawn to articles about orbital, optical and particle decay, bedrocks of twentieth century thinking that her own highly praised work has called into question for their defeatist assumptions. She covers white boards with complex mathematical equations, which are meant to bring her peace but do not. She visits a spa and has the last two weeks peeled from her skin and sucked from her pores, but that little taste of death has burrowed deep. Eventually she goes back.

What she discovers is that she is far from Clea’s only suitor. In fact there are varied, equally perfect rivals – a plasticine gameshow host, a senator known for his moralistic stance against reproduction, a captain recently returned from a long space voyage two years younger than when he’d left – but there is something in Justine’s urgent need that matches Clea’s own lack of time and a surreptitious affair is sparked. While Justine is first drawn to all the unknown, forbidden secrets of Clea’s flesh, which are described in long and longing paragraphs, the more dangerous seduction is ultimately by Clea’s mortal thinking: the vitality of doing almost anything for a final time, the rare power that one amasses by being able to say “no more.” Although Justine repeatedly begs Clea to accept her protection, to allow Justine to give her life, it is her own attachment to health that unravels.

At this point, Clea devolves, unfortunately, into a very traditional, even male, perhaps colonial novel, in which Justine, as a representative of an advanced society, sets out to save the seemingly weaker, more vulnerable Other, who never emerges as a fully realized character in her own right, only to find herself ultimately corrupted by Clea’s primitive ways. “Going native,” as it were, Justine abandons the world as she knows it, and the final chapter devolves into a long, lecturing monologue, not unlike the quote above.

Colin Hamilton is the author of a novel The Thirteenth Month (Black Lawrence Press), and a poetry chapbook (Kent State University Press). He is currently working on a collection of stories based on imagined books found in the discard room of a library. He has helped create a library, a center for dance, and multiple affordable housing projects for artists. He lives in St. Paul, where he runs a consulting business for nonprofits.

Obstruction

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Melissa Grunow

The personification creates distance from the “I” while still giving space to an experience that is highly personal and typically unspoken.

Perhaps it’s like a crawl space under a home, an old home, one that would also have a root cellar or a fallout shelter or a sitting parlor or a servant’s quarters, or all of those things. The home itself has been updated, restored, neglected, then again loved and cared for under new ownership. The crawl space, however, is a dark, cold forgotten place, rife with thick cobwebs, discarded wood ash from the central fireplace degrading into the dirt floor.

The space is rarely explored, at least to this depth, and now there is an obstruction. If it doesn’t get removed, the long-term integrity of the entire house could be compromised. A darkness like black mold, an infection of sorts, would seep upward and outward, penetrating the structure to crawl along every vein and artery that remains hidden under the heavy plaster walls. The dust in the HVAC system would cough and choke, the knob and tube wiring would short out—maybe even catch fire—the old iron pipes would groan, crack, vomit rust into the ceramic sinks.

All the experts will agree: the obstruction is an easy removal. Just as quickly as it’s designed to fill the space beneath the house, it’s engineered to be removed five years later (or maybe it will become seven; they’re still conducting studies), collapsing onto itself and emerging with a gentle tug of the retrieval strings. The house is prone to reproducing unwanted rooms; the twice-a-decade swap of the obstruction will prevent that. It’s 99.7 percent effective; the most effective form of its kind of the market.

A handyman disappears under the house with a flashlight and a clamp, expected to return in a few minutes with the obstruction. She narrates her way through the narrow cavities, explaining what she sees, or more importantly, what she doesn’t see. The house groans around her. She cannot find the strings; there is nothing to pull.

A contractor arrives a week later with an apprentice and a radar technician who will stand in front of the hearth in the parlor, compressing the floor and projecting a sonar image of what she sees. The flashlight was not enough; they come equipped with state-of-the-art technology to seek out those illusive strings and give them a tug.

The contractor disappears into the crawl space. She doesn’t explain what she sees. She expresses her compassion for the house, each time it groans and creaks, her equipment putting pressure on its most sensitive cavities.

It should take ten minutes, less with a crew of that size, that level of experience. After nearly an hour, the plaster walls of the house begin to sweat, the foundation begins to tremble. The apprentice opens the windows, turns on a fan, attempts to cool the house while the contractor and the radar tech pack up their equipment.

“It’s likely embedded,” the contractor says. “We need to reschedule and bring a bigger team out here.” They will have to return in a month when the house goes into hibernation. A sleeping house is a house that cannot groan, sweat, or feel.

She doesn’t say so, but she must have bumped a rusted pipe or brushed against an old shut-off valve, for the faucet in the powder room develops a slow, steady drip that cannot be stopped. The drips are the color of blood and remain constant, falling one at a time, splashing against the ceramic basin like quiet tears rolling over the subtle lines of aging skin.

By starting this essay with “perhaps,” readers are immediately immersed in the imagined, which is—to me—the starting point for speculative nonfiction. I wrote about this experience as speculative, rather than “real,” because the experience itself was so traumatic, invasive, and even a little embarrassing, that the only way I could tell the story was through the use of extended metaphor. The body becomes a house, the midwife at the busy gynecologist’s office becomes the handyman, and the doctor becomes a hired contractor with the nurse-as-apprentice assisting. Through the extended metaphor and imagined scene of an obstruction in a dark crawl space, I personify the house as it experiences pain, begins to sweat and tremble, and bleeds out through a leaking rusted pipe. The personification creates distance from the “I” while still giving space to an experience that is highly personal and typically unspoken.

—

Melissa Grunow is the author of I Don’t Belong Here: Essays and the four-time award-winning memoir, Realizing River City. Her work has appeared in Brevity, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, Two Hawks Quarterly, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as listed in the Best American Essays notables 2016, 2018, and 2019. She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Central College. Visit her website at www.melissagrunow.com for more information.

Why I Am Not a Poet

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Erik Anderson

The white male body is not marked, or so white men are raised to think.

When I was eighteen and a freshman in college, the poet Ron Padgett visited the writing class I was then taking in a surprisingly bright basement room. We had been studying Padgett’s New & Selected Poems, and during the Q&A I asked him to read aloud a sonnet from the book, fourteen lines that repeated the same thing: “Nothing in that drawer.” He laughed and then delivered each line with a slightly different intonation. He was making fun of me a little, but I appreciated the joke. I liked that I was in on it.

Padgett read another poem that day mocking the notion of a young writer “finding his voice.” The poem, “Voice,” concludes with the assertion, “I hope I never find mine. I / wish to remain a phony the rest of my life.” The punning punchline (phone comes from the Greek for sound or voice) seems to come at sincerity’s expense, suggesting that the speaker’s “phoniness” is more real than any candor the poet might offer. The irony is that Padgett’s voice was as affable and wry in person as on the page. His phoniness was genuine, though I didn’t understand this at the time. For years, through no fault of Padgett’s, I was more suspicious of voice, my own in particular, than I should have been—at a time, moreover, when that was probably self-defeating.

The deeper suspicion I gleaned from “Voice,” and from much else I read over the decade that followed, was of expression itself. I saw as dated and juvenile the notion that there could be anything uniquely inside or about a self that one might want or need to convey. I believed in art but not in communication. I valued life but distrusted the self, or selves, that experienced it. In the many hundreds of poems I wrote between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, pronouns were abstractions: I was certainly another, and another, and another, but it was never me. My poems were sophisticated—clever, refined, experimental, and specious—but they were indistinct and indistinguishable. They lacked precisely the qualities that my voice, whatever that is, might have given them.

Put another way, I never quite learned how to be a body in a poem, never learned how to speak on my own behalf. The language divided me from what was being said, and it bears lingering on the tragedy of that, which is more timely, and enduring, than it might first appear. Because I didn’t trust, let alone know how to use, words to depict bodily or interior experience, I didn’t trust that experience. I was so deeply suspicious of the message’s mechanisms, that I didn’t trust the message.

All of that changed on Labor Day weekend in 2007, when I was assaulted by a group of men near my apartment in central Denver. Struck with incredible force by a man the police believed must have been holding brass knuckles, my nose and right cheekbone were badly broken. Much else broke or broke open in me that night. I was raw and hurting and there was no glossing over what I felt. There was only feeling. Language’s task was to reveal that feeling to the friends who drove me to the hospital, to the triage nurse and emergency room doctors, to my wife on the phone, visiting family a thousand miles away. Words became a nifty tool. They built bridges, not walls, and they linked up with my emotional registers in a way they rarely had before. There was nothing phony about it.

In the weeks and months after, the signs of my assault (and the corrective surgery that followed) visible on my face, I continued to speak with the same urgency and necessity. I told the story to everyone who asked, and plenty did. I couldn’t yet explain why, I would say, but I was grateful to my assailants. I felt more open and connected to others than I ever had. It slowly dawned on me that the person I had been up until that point hadn’t been that great, and that the person I might now become was only possible because the previous self had shattered. The men who attacked me had done so out of malice, but I wondered what they would think if they knew they had done me a favor. Would they flinch at the word, as so many have?

After a dozen years I understand the dimensions of their gift more clearly. They liberated me from pretense, from the phoniness of my poems, but they also gave me my body in a profound and enduring way. Until then—and how strange a notion this is to me now—I didn’t really consider myself as having a body. The body was a biological fact, but one divorced from how I interacted with others, and it certainly had no connection with my intellectual and artistic life, none that I would have accepted or even acknowledged anyway.

I’m not unique in this misapprehension. Most white men, I would argue, especially straight ones, are by default abstracted from the body, and detached from the consequences of identity. The white male body is not marked, or so white men are raised to think. And because we’re trained to see ourselves as insusceptible in this regard, we come to believe we’re impervious in other ways as well. We take our safety as a given, and it is a hallmark of both our privilege and our ignorance. What my assailants gave to me was the knowledge, obvious in itself, that everything depends upon the body, but also that the body is more than the sum of its parts. An account of the mechanisms of my steps along the stretch of Denver sidewalk near the corner of 9th and Washington would, from one perspective, adequately describe the body walking into danger, but in insisting on that body as an individual, autonomous actor, such a description would conceal the equally important fact that the body is a social construction. And it was this construction, more than anything else, that my assailants attacked and to some extent demolished.

The body, I know now, participates in a field of feeling, but an inability to attach words to feelings limits one’s access to that field, which is almost continuous, almost, with language itself. Pain, Rebecca Solnit writes, defines and delimits the body—“what you cannot feel is not you”—but “you participate in the social body with those you empathize with, whose pain pains you.” In the years since my assault, my work as a writer and teacher has been about entering that field, participating in that social body, or trying to. Because I never learned how a body might do that in a poem—because, as Claudia Rankine writes, loss isn’t “something an ‘I’ discusses socially”—I turned, pro se, to prose.

The question of not writing poetry is now the question of my life. My first book, The Poetics of Trespass, was a lovesong and farewell to the poem. My second, Estranger, includes a brief postmortem on my unremarkable life as a poet. The title essay of my collection, Flutter Point, centers on a brief period in 2013 when I tried to salvage my old poems and immediately came down with shingles. The question has come up in every job interview I’ve had since 2007, and I’ve answered it in the other sort of interview as well. It gives people pause, the idea that one could change so completely, that a person’s primary mode of being in or understanding the world could shift almost overnight, that a person could say goodbye to a previous self without much remorse or regret. Mine is a conversion story, and whether it’s Paul on the road to Damascus or Gregor Samsa in his bed, whether the sinner becomes a saint or vice versa, we want to believe that change, even redemption, is possible.

Such change is rarely as easy, however, as waking up a new person. In a recent essay for Lit Hub, I argued against mistaking disclosure for liberation and advocated the hard work of telling one’s story rather than reducing it, as to a tweet. The truncated version of events I’ve offered here omits my years in therapy, my stubborn but intermittent depression, and much else that I’ve channeled into my work. Because to change is not to achieve new and different stabilities: it’s a process either the circumstances of one’s life, or the forces of one’s will, set in motion. Writing nonfiction has allowed me to chart and shape that process in a way that the multifarious strictures of poetry (and even experimental poetry sometimes offers its versions of a straightjacket) or the imagined worlds of novels never could. Nonfiction has allowed me to participate in what the writer Susan Griffin calls the “public cognitive scene”: not writing as a mode of expression or an exercise in aesthetics but as a way of collaboratively and collectively learning and understanding.

These days it takes a lot for me to crack open a book of poems, much less read the whole thing through. Because I know poetry is thriving, not dying, I know there are plenty of poets out there whose work I would admire. As for my own poems, the memory of those shingles—like a sword through the rib cage—is still fresh enough for me to avoid the stresses of making and breaking lines.

Some percolate through, nonetheless—Frank O’Hara’s, for instance, my first favorite. Written in 1956, when the poet was three-fourths of the way through his short forty-year life, “Why I Am Not a Painter” breezily contrasts the artist Mike Goldberg’s work with his own. Goldberg paints the word “Sardines” on a canvas before obfuscating it in the final version, which retains the word as its title. O’Hara recounts, in contrast, the composition of his poem “Oranges: 12 Pastorals,” written in 1949. One day, O’Hara says, he was thinking about the color orange and so wrote a line about it. Soon it was a “whole page of words, not lines.” “It is even in / prose,” he writes, “I am a real poet.” A single word may have been too much for Goldberg, who thought in line (of a different sort) and color, but for O’Hara, the real poet, a single word was a portal into so many others. Where the “Sardines” of Goldberg’s title hints at all that language cannot do, the “Oranges” of O’Hara’s—at least in his telling—point to all it can.

But me? Last week I was walking the High Line with my friend, braving its crowds, rather, and marveling at the scale and speed of the area’s development. The rail line had been a ruin, but the city couldn’t allow it to remain so. There is something in the human psyche that refuses defeat and decay and debris, my friend said, and there’s something both optimistic and maybe a little foolhardy in that. Because there are also times when the wreckage of some previous life becomes plain, when what we’ve papered over becomes visible once more. I am interested in that moment, I told him, interested in holding open the aperture, in residing with what pains us. Boarding my train back to Lancaster soon after, I thought there should be so much more, not of ruins but of our conversation, of how terrible life is but also how generous.

Days have gone by. I sit down to write to my friend, to thank him for his good company. Pretty soon I’ve written pages, not of thanks precisely, but about losing or finding one’s voice, which is nothing like a copy of The Village Voice, a once-physical thing one might have misplaced or recovered; the voice is nothing outside of or detachable from one’s body but coterminous, and coextensive, with it. When I’ve finished I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing my face. My right cheek sags a little, as the surgeon said it would, and my nose tacks a little to the left. The scar leading through and above my eyebrow is faint enough people rarely mention it. Whatever one calls these marks, they are not, for me, the stuff of poetry, but much as O’Hara saw in oranges what Goldberg couldn’t see in sardines, for some other body they could be.

Having finished my thank you note, which is now a whole essay, I sit back down at the table and—I am a real writer—open a new email, type in my friend’s address. I attach. I hit send.

Erik Anderson is the author of four books of nonfiction, most recently Bird, published in 2020 as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. He teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, where from 2014-2019 he directed the annual Emerging Writers Festival.

Editor’s Comments

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

Given the gravity of this moment, we will take a pause from our usual practice of individual speculations on issues relevant to the issue at hand and offer the following comments.
—Leila & Robin

Speculative Nonfiction will be donating all submission fees collected from issue #3 to the NAACP and The Movement for Black Lives. For the remainder of 2020, we will waive the submission fee for any writer who makes a financial contribution to one of these organizations working for racial justice.

The theme of erasure seemed a logical choice after our issue on “What history teaches.” Still, we could never have known just how fitting it would seem given the global pandemic and uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd. When we were thinking of the notion of erasure, we were not thinking, exclusively, about the erasures of history, about empires and individuals, about colonial and racist power structures that attempt(ed) to erase or succeeded in erasing the lives of individuals and peoples. We were not thinking exclusively about the erasures caused by disease, by wars and famines. We were not thinking exclusively about the massive erasures of bio-diversity, happening in real time from environmental degradation and rapid climate change. We were not thinking exclusively about the tendency to see no evil when evil persists all around us, erasures of conscience. We were not thinking exclusively of the technique of erasure, employed by some of the writers in this volume, of taking an existing text and erasing words around it to create a new text.

As with all our themes, we envision them broadly, as thoughtful invitations and provocations to investigate, experiment, invent, and of course, speculate around our theme.

In 1938, nine months before the start of World War Two, poet W.H. Auden wrote the poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” whose subject, in part, was the painting by Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, painted in 1555. In the painting, we see a mountainous landscape on what seems an ordinary sunny day. A farmer plows a field with his horse in the foreground, his head bent to the earth while another man farther away seems to be idly looking up in the sky. Farther still, a fisher is busily tending to his lines. A merchant ship heads out of the bay, its sails billowing on this apparently windy day. Between the fisherman and the ship, and easily overlooked, a pair of legs seem to scissor kick, caught a moment before the entire body is submerged. We know the story of Icarus and why he fell, but Brueghel has imagined (in a very Dutch context) the moment of his falling. Once we notice those legs, we know why that one man is scanning the skies, that something unusual in the sky has attracted his attention – one minute it was there, something falling rapidly, was it human? Where did it disappear? The man at the plow noticed nothing and the same for the fisherman, or if they did, if the fisherman heard the splash, he must have determined that it didn’t concern him. And what of the people safely aboard the merchant ship. As Auden speculates, that “expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

The fact that we do not always directly see the suffering of others does not erase their suffering or our collective responsibility to respond. For hundreds of years, Black lives have been sacrificed to make this country “great.” The fact of Black people being murdered is not new, but the recent awakening of a majority of this country to that shameful fact is something novel. As artists, we often imagine the seemingly impossible. As artists, we are open to imagining the world differently. Sailing calmly on should no longer be an option.

Robin Hemley
Leila Philip

June 25, 2020

Note: The editors wish to thank Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole for their permission to use images of their individual works and an excerpt from their beautiful collaborative project, Human Archipelago. For more on this project, see Madigan Haley’s essay “Writing Nearby Images, Seeing the Black” in Speculations on the Field.

But for Our Words: A Redaction

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Cherie Nelson

Speculation allows me to move beyond acknowledging the shifting and slippery nature of this self to enacting the experience of being this self.

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” I haven’t ever been quite able to shake this idea from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: that our selves are not as singular as we would like to believe. As an essayist, the most frequent subject of my writing is my self, in all its varied, multitudinous, and contradictory forms. Speculation allows me to move beyond acknowledging the shifting and slippery nature of this self to enacting the experience of being this self. Through the use of speculation, I am able to assert “this may be true of me” and “this also may be true of me” and “even this may be true of me” something that resists our desire to confine the self to one specific location, set of desires or questions, a singular, easily-won meaning. In this piece, I use erasure in order to represent the different layers (and truths) of my experience of faith and language. Just as my self is complex and multitudinous, yet true, each text (the original and the subsequent redacted versions) tells a whole truth about this experience even when they seem fragmented, or worse, contradictory.

—

Cherie Nelson earned her MA in Literature and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University where she currently teaches undergraduate writing and literature classes. She is the editor of The Waking: Ruminate Magazine Online and her work is forthcoming in The Florida Review.

Southern Bells

June 25, 2020 Speculative Nonfiction

by Elizabeth Avery Thomas

Speculation and extrapolation are necessary tools to excavate what’s been hidden.

"The loudest noise in the world is silence." —Thelonius Monk

I grew up with the ringing of bells. Three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, my family would sit down at the dining table, my mother would pick up the bell placed discreetly near her, and she would ring it once, just a single chime. Then the mouth of the bell would close over the wood of the table, its singing tongue stopped. After a few seconds, the kitchen door would open, and a servant would bring us our food. My father was a diplomat and I grew up in Southeast Asia. Looking back on it now, it seems surreal, alien, but then it was all I knew.

I’d never thought much about the bells. They were just part of the strange furniture of a life I once lived and that seemed to have very little to do with me. But I come from a long line of women who rang bells that called people with brown skin to serve them. My ancestors, the Averys, were the largest slave-owners in western North Carolina; the bell and the dining table I sit at were once at my family’s plantation, and this inanimate inheritance haunts me now. The small brass bell, with its dark wooden handle, smoothed and conditioned by generations or women’s hands, its etched decorative border of vining flowers, is easy to underestimate. Very simply, it took away the need for words. The bell did it all, and its chime made the unvoiced command sound sweet. At its call, unpaid brown hands brought—to the polished table they had set with bone china and engraved silver—platters piled with food grown by forced labor in the fields around the house.

The Southern belles who were my ancestors didn’t have to yell for their food (that would be crass). They didn’t have to open the door to the kitchen, feel the heat of it, see the sweat running down the face of the woman cooking at a fire in high summer. They didn’t have to look in her eyes, say her name, acknowledge that she had no choice but to obey their every word. Ringing the bell, the mistress wouldn’t have to hear the whip in her own voice. Words have power, even small ones. Which is why slaves weren’t allowed to learn to read or write, or even allowed to have legal names. To have a legal name was to be recognized as human; to have command of the written word was a physical manifestation of their humanity: the word made flesh, or the experience of their flesh made into words. A voice.

The white women and men I descend from used their words and stories to build the myth of the elegant, gracious plantation life—stories saying that slavery wasn’t that bad, that they, the enslaved people, were inferior and needed white guidance. The stories could only stand because they were built on the foundation of the silence of the enslaved. I know all too well the stories we white people tell. I remember once, going through family papers with my mother, and coming across one of the plantation’s slave ledgers. She leafed through it and finally said, “Well, they bought them shoes once a year, so they must have been good slave owners.” But the words “good” and “slave owner” are mutually exclusive. The simple act of “owning” another human being taints every other part of your life—in part because it is an absolute wrong, and in part because you must lie to yourself to make it acceptable. This Gone With the Wind version of life in the old South is the story we whites have told ourselves and the world repeatedly until we believe, against all common sense and human decency, that it’s true.

It’s important to remember that the myths we have spun cover up not only the truth about black lives, but also the truth about our own lives. Growing up, when one of us kids would mention some unsavory fact about a family member—their alcoholism or suicide—my grandmother would say, “We don’t talk about that.” So, we didn’t. And as in my family, in every shadowed corner of every “gracious” Southern plantation’s history, there are suppressed stories. In my own family there was the baby daughter of an enslaved woman, raped and impregnated by the son of the house, who was given at the age of two as a gift to her own white cousin. There were mistresses and illegitimate children on the other side of town that everyone knew about, whispered about. But we don’t talk about that. The stories my great grandmothers, those Southern belles, told, and the ones they didn’t tell, were part of the same wider lie of the gracious plantation South, which twisted and tainted everything it touched. There is a cost to those that lie, as well as to those lied about.

As I look at my mother’s bell now, it seems to glimmer between the simple thing it is and the history it was a part of. Small things have power. Its gold mouth rests silent now against the warm mahogany of the table that once stood at the heart of a plantation house, which stood surrounded by fields tilled by forced labor, which was surrounded by other forced labor camps, which were patrolled by armed, violent white men. The mouth of the bell, ringed with flowering vines, contains the silence of the enslaved, its brass shell like the monuments we once put up to retell the history of the Civil War and of slavery.

But, of course, dissenting voices can never be entirely silenced. Stories whisper down generations. Resistance can be camouflaged as worship; those who cannot speak can sing. “Tell ol’ Pharaoh to let my people go!” or “Wade in the water” as a way to escape the patroller’s dogs. Each voice that gets through, like a slow-creeping vine, makes a crack in the foundation. And for long slow years it seems that nothing is happening. Till one day monuments begin to fall and voices stopped and ignored cannot be stopped any longer. And a small bell, whose voice once had power over the lives of others, becomes only a curiosity. I keep it to remind myself of what it spoke and who its ringing silenced.

In my current work, exploring Southern history through the lens of my family, the accepted “facts” I’ve inherited are self-justifying fictions. Since the lives of the non-literate Native and enslaved people in my family’s world are not directly documented, the truth of those lives is all too easily erased. Speculation and extrapolation are necessary tools to excavate what’s been hidden. In this piece, I start with two objects – a bell and a table – that were once in my family’s plantation house. Using them as anchors, I imagine the lives of those who controlled them and those who were controlled by them. In doing so, I hope to undermine the fictional histories we’ve been given and reveal some truths about the lives lived in the orbit of those objects.

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Elizabeth Avery Thomas has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and has published both fiction and nonfiction. She is currently at work on His Father’s Son: William Holland Thomas, Yonaguska, and the Forgotten History of Cherokee Resistance on the Appalachian Frontier, a social biography of her second great grandfather who was adopted by a band of Cherokees and helped them evade the Trail of Tears.